From the course: Learning Grasshopper

How to perform Move transformations in Grasshopper

From the course: Learning Grasshopper

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How to perform Move transformations in Grasshopper

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- [Instructor] In this video, we'll look at the move component in Grasshopper, which we can use to move geometry around in Rhinos 3D space. This is located under the transform component tab, in the Euclidean sub-panel. In my example file, I've already got a move component and I've gone ahead and constructed a box with a few slider inputs for sizing that we can use as a movement example. So the move component takes its inputs, a base geometry which is the thing we'll be moving, an emotion vector, which determines where that geometry gets moved to. I'll go ahead and take my box output and connect it to my move components geometry input. Now the default motion vector is 0, 0, 10 or 10 units up in the Z-direction. And I can see by clicking to select that move component in Grasshopper, in Rhino, I get a duplicate box that's 10 units above my original. Now let's say I wanted to move to a different location I can do that lots of different ways. I can either right-click on that vector input going to have to set one vector and manually specify in Rhino a location for the box to move to. So here I could just specify an endpoint by clicking and it moves right where I clicked. In a similar fashion, I could click on manage vector collection and this would allow me to go in and manually type in vector information. So let's say I wanted something a little bit more round here, I could just type that in, I could add additional vectors by clicking and then do some more editing, and that would give me duplicate boxes. Now, in addition to manually entering in vector information I could also take vector input from pretty much any of the components that are under the vector tab in the vector sub panel, all of these output vectors, and I can use those as inputs for a move component. So I've got a few sets here already set up, first one is vector XYZ and I've just plugged in some numbers sliders, so this will give us a vector with an X or Y and Z component that we can use to specify where the box gets moved to. And you can see as I'm sliding, each of those sliders I'm updating each dimension of the movement vector. We could also use any of the unit vector components, so these will move just in a single direction, and in this case I have a unit Z vector connected to a number slider. So let's plug that into the move component. And here you can see I'm just moving either up or down depending on the value of a slider. Now where the move component and grasshopper really starts to shine and really starts to distinguish itself from what we would do manually in Rhino is when we start to combine it with our data stream. So down at the bottom in this group, I've got still a unit Z component. And this time though, it's connected to a serious component and that's going to to let me generate a lot of duplicates very easily. So let's go ahead and connect this. Now at first glance, it's going to look like we're just doing the same thing as we did with this unit Z in the one slider. But as I increase my count, you can see I get more duplicates, I can adjust how far each of those are spaced very, very easily. So you can see with just a few clicks I've done something that is very complex while still remaining very dynamic. So that's an overview of the move component in Grasshopper.

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